Monday Feb 11, 2013

While implementing an LOV, the choice has to be made about
the UI component that will be used for displaying the list of values. When this
list is small the preference is given to the Select One Choice (choice list). Otherwise Combo Box is preferred because it provides
additional functionality like search, filter etc. Select One Choice executes
database query on page load to retrieve the list data whereas the LOV
queries are not executed at page load.These are executed only on demand, when the user opens the LOV
component. This implies that for faster page loading, we should use Select One
Choice only for those attributes for which the returned list contains few rows. On
second load, however, the values for the Select One Choice will be retrieved from the cache. Thus,
there might be inconsistencies if the data is changed. So, if there is a long
LOV the Select One Choice might not be the best choice.

In the UI Hint tab, if
the component selected is Combo Box then the UI provides
the facility to add the Search/Filter facility; it allows to specify the MRU
count, query limit and other options.The Query Limitserves to control the VO fetch size and to change the number of records the Combo
Box can display. Specifying a large value is not recommended. When the Query Limit is set, then
the VO’s source XML file is modified internally. The <ListBinding> tag created for the LOV is changed and the
attribute ListRangeSize is set to
the value specified for the Query Limit.
The <ListBinding>element maps the list data source attribute to the LOV-enabled
attribute. The ListRangeSize attribute
governs the number of items that will be shown at time in the component.

The number of rows that the LOV fetches is
determined in part by the ListRangeSizesetting in the LOV-enabled attribute’s list binding definition. This definition can be specified in the Edit List of Values dialog (of this
attribute, in the VO Overview editor). If the number of records fetched is very
large, the default value for ListRangeSize
may truncate the
values (to be displayed in the component).
The default number of fetched records for LOV depends on the type of
component used to display the records. For instance, in the case of the Combo Box with
List of Values component and the Input Text with List of Values component, the
default value for ListRangeSize is 10. For all
other types of list components including Select One Choice list, the default value for ListRangeSize is set to -1, meaning all. However, the ListRangeSizevalue has no effect on the records that the end user can search
on in the lookup dialog displayed for the List of Values type components.

Query Limit is disabled for all other component
types including the Select One Choice List component. These components place no
restriction on the number of rows that the LOV will access. However, it is not recommended to set ListRangeSize=-1 since it may lead to a
performance hit. For
components like Select One Choice list this value can be modified manually in the VO
source XML file and set to a smaller size.

Apart from setting the above properties, it is required to
set some tuning options for improving the performance of the LOVs. The View
Accessor is used to access the data source for LOV attribute. It is an ADF BC
mechanism that lets one obtain full list of possible values from the row set of
the data source VO. The View Accessor can also be used to limit the set of
values the LOV displays. The View Accessor Edit dialog provides the facility to
set the tuning options.

The count specified for In
Batches of specifies the number of rows to be fetched from the database in
each batch. The As Needed and All at Once options work in
conjunction with the value of the In
Batches of for determining the number of
round trips. Thus the in Batches of
specifies the fetch size.When the
access mode is set to Range Paging, Range Paging Auto Post, or Range Paging Incremental, the range
size is used to specify the number of rows to be fetched for the row set. The
default range size is -1 and fetches all the rows.

Thus, to conclude, the fetch size and range size specify the number of
rows fetched from the database and the number of round trips to the database.
They do not control the number of LOV items displayed at runtime. This is
controlled by the Query Limit
attribute on the UI Hint Tab for the Combo box list of values LOV component and
the ListRangeSize attribute of the < ListBinding> tag in the VO
xml for all other LOV components.